


Resolution

by NightsMistress



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:59:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Kit receives a message to come and rescue Ronan from what would be near-certain death, he certainly didn't expect his sister to be the one to rescue both of them, all of them of them becoming intimately involved in a wizard's Ordeal or that his personal life would become much more complicated.</p><p>Perhaps he should have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Resolution

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gray Shadows (the_afterlight)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_afterlight/gifts).



As far as rescues went, it really didn’t.

One of the peculiarities of the universe was that not every planet was comfortable with the notion of wizards working amongst them. While most treated them with respect, some were apprehensive and some were hostile. Then there were the planets where wizards were warned "do not go here unless you absolutely have to". One such planet was the core world for the Lesckan Empire, a world scarred after overshadowed wizards got their hands on some serious weaponry and absolutely no qualms against using it if it meant annihilating one another. Needless to say, wizards were Unwelcome, to say the least, even centuries later. While there were some old, still functional wizardies in place, it seemed that the world was quite happy with the absence of wizardry in their lives and would enforce it vigorously. Wizards were told that the Powers had plans for the place, but that for the time being they were to steer well clear, especially with the recent, disastrous swing in anti-wizardry sentiment. Rather than simply being arrested and deported, wizards were to be killed by way of public execution to send a message.

It was a terrible time to be visiting, and no one knew that as much as Kit Rodriguez. Unfortunately, he wasn't here by choice.

The first point in Kit’s favor was he had found Ronan’s prison cell, _with_ Ronan inside it, who was staring at him wide-eyed like he was an unwelcome and unwanted apparition. Another point in his favour: Ronan had not been executed for being a contrary wizard who wouldn’t do as he was told, left to haunt his cell like a particularly cantankerous Celto-ghost-punk. Third point in Kit’s favour was that Ronan actually looked all right, dirt, blood smears and a week of stubble notwithstanding.

Unfortunately, a strike against Kit was that he was now also locked in Ronan’s prison cell, a bracelet that nullified wizardry around each wrist and a newly forming bruise across his face where one of the aliens had backhanded him (or rather, backclawed him -- the Lescki looked something like midnight-blue ants) for resisting arrest.

“I’ve come to rescue you,” Kit said, sitting down on the bed opposite Ronan. He spared a moment for wondering where an insectoid species had _found_ a bed suitable for humanoids, let alone the two that were in the cell, arranged on the intersecting walls furthest away from the waste facility in the far right corner. From what the manual had told him, the Lescki preferred inclined benches when they rested, which would cause most humanoid species some degree of discomfort, and they certainly didn’t use the type of waste facilities that humanoids used, which was also present. The handleless, smooth metal walls and door seemed like they could have been lifted from any futuristic prison movie, and Kit found the whole set up profoundly disquieting.

After taking in the room and realizing that there really wasn’t an immediate way to escape, Kit returned his full attention to Ronan, who was continuing to stare at him.

“Bang-up job,” Ronan replied finally, scrubbing at his face with the heel of his hand. “Was the arrest part of the plan?”

“Not especially,” Kit had to confess. Ronan managed a tired quirk of his lips at this, pushing himself upright from where he had slouched against the wall.

"And where is Miss Yank in all of this?"

"I didn't bring her." Kit tried not to squirm as he said this, an urge that became almost too much to bear when Ronan grinned that familiar, sardonic grin that Kit found exceedingly irritating and suspected Ronan did on purpose.

"Someone's in the doghouse. Don't you remember the _last_ time you left her out of an errantry? She’s only just stopped going on about the Mars thing. Are you really that keen to have her blast you off the face of the earth?” Kit hated it when Ronan’s voice took on that particular cadence. It always correlated with Ronan passing commentary on some impending disaster, usually one that Kit or Nita had personally had a hand in creating and did not want any kind of commentary on at all. Of late, he had been going on and on about the destruction he claimed Nita and Kit left in their wake. It was completely and utterly unfair.

“You know there were circumstances...” Kit’s voice had taken on the tired tones of someone who’d had this argument many, _many_ times before and was desperately weary of it all.

“And this will be the third one she destroys, and the second for you, boyo. I’m starting to think we need to register you as a threat to all peaceable and sensible folk.”

“Do we have any of those here?”

“Only by force. They stripped me of everything.” Ronan sighed. “It took them fifteen minutes, too. I could have _sworn_ they wouldn’t find the dissociator.”

Normally Kit would have teased Ronan about his penchant for building weapons of mass destruction, and whether he was compensating for something. However, given how extremely useful those weapons would be right now, his heart wasn’t in it.

“But now you’re here, let’s do something exciting,” Ronan continued, eyeing off Kit’s wrists. Kit wasn’t sure he liked what that expression meant. Kit had learned through painful experience whenever Ronan grinned like that, the _only_ person who was going to be enjoying himself would be Ronan. “Let’s rescue ourselves. Preferably before Nita shows us up.”

The prospect of rescuing himself did hold some appeal, Kit had to admit. It wasn’t that he resented having Nita rescue him so often -- after all, _he_ had rescued her when she had been about to give up her wizardry. But of late it seemed that Kit hadn’t been able to do anything right, while Nita kept excelling. It wasn’t necessarily that he was _jealous_ but … he was afraid that soon she wouldn’t need him. As such, when Ronan’s message -- delayed as it had been by a week as a result of distance and some _really_ creative anti-wizardry communication jamming fields that had been put in place by the Lescki -- had managed to reach him, Kit had jumped on it without even thinking to contact Nita.

That may not have been his best move, he realized. At the time, he had thought it would be a simple swoop in and snatch Ronan out exercise, and that it would take at most an hour. Two, if Ronan had managed to annoy the natives as much as he was capable of -- which was a lot, in Kit’s experience. It was obvious that Kit had drastically underestimated how much the Lescki _really_ wanted to keep Ronan captive. The firefight he had teleported into had made _that_ abundantly clear and now Kit was captured as well as Ronan. To make matters worse, Nita had absolutely no clue that he was gone, let alone that he was in need of rescuing. It was the Mars incident all over again. All they were missing was Darryl.

“What makes you think Nita is going to come to rescue us?” Kit asked. “This prison is _really_ hard to find.”

Ronan snorted. “Honestly, I’m surprised she hasn’t torn the place down already. You’ve been missing an hour, after all.”

Kit conceded the point with a nod.

Ronan continued on. “Or, if you’re so horrified at the idea of Nita rescuing us, maybe I could rescue _you_. It seems that you have a good run in damsel in distress.”

Kit punched Ronan in the shoulder. “Yeah, I can see how your cunning plan is working there.”

“I was waiting for an audience,” Ronan said. “No point in staging the best prison breakout ever seen if no one is there to see it.”

“You waited a _week_?” Rather than wait for Ronan to answer that, Kit just shook his head. “So what is it?”

Ronan shrugged. “I’ll think of it. Give me time.”

Kit groaned in frustration, flopping onto his back on the bed and staring at the ceiling. “You’ve _had_ time. When you _do_ think of it, let me know.”

“In the meantime,” Ronan said. “I’m bored. I’ve been in here, alone, for a _week_ , and let me tell you there’s only so much you can do on your own in that time. I am so bored that I will even listen to you talk about your school life if you are that way inclined.”

“I’m on vacation, Ronan,” Kit said.

“It was an example. Talking about Nita before, how is she? Being out for a week means that you’ll have to provide me with my weekly update about how you’ve annoyed her lately.”

Kit sat up on one elbow and shot Ronan a very indignant look. “Me? Annoy _her_? No way!”

“Yes,” Ronan said. “I am apparently the requisite good-looking sassy friend in this romantic comedy dyad. It’s very trying.”

“It’s not a _dyad_ ,” Kit muttered, slouching back down on the bed.

Ronan blinked. “Then what is it?”

“We decided to see other people,” Kit said. “At the same time as we see each other.”

“I go away for _one week_ , and suddenly my friends all date each other at the same time. God forbid I leave for a month.”

“Actually,” Kit said. “We’ve been doing it for months. It just seemed the best course of action.”

“I’m sure calendar makers of the world appreciate your decision.” After a moment’s silence, Ronan added “So why am I hearing about this _now_?”

Kit made a face. “Every time I raise the subject you manage to find something –- _anything_ -– else to talk about.”

“Well, yeah. Why would I want to listen to you mooning around about how pretty you find this particular feature of Nita? Don’t get me wrong, she’s an interesting girl but you _were_ really annoying for a while there.”

Kit conceded the point. He was rapidly running out of them.

“Next time,” Ronan said. “I will make a point of going ‘So Kit, how many people are in your harem this week’. And then you will hit me with something.”

This sounded fairly accurate. _Too_ accurate. Kit changed the subject. “So, what’s going on with you and Carmela? You two seem to be spending a lot of time together lately.” It was one of the strange things of the universe but in the last few months Ronan and Carmela had shifted from prey and predator (in that order) to co-conspirators. What exactly they were conspiring about Kit wasn’t entirely sure, but the universe was honestly safer if Carmela and Ronan were at odds rather than working together. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

“Nothing?” Ronan said. It sounded innocent. Almost too innocent. “Haven’t you already asked Carmela this very question seven times this month? She said seven last time we spoke.”

“You’re talking about me?”

“Only peripherally. Not everything is about you, Kit.”

“Then what _do_ you talk about?”

It was Ronan’s turn to make a face. “You want me to recount hours of conversation to satisfy your curiosity?”

Kit thought about this. “Yes.”

“No. That’s stupid. You can be assured it’s not about you, or Nita, or anything connected to the two of you except tangentially.”

That wasn’t reassuring. Kit assumed that was the point, and was annoyed that it was _working_.

“So, thought of the plan yet?” Kit said.

Ronan moaned dramatically and flopped onto the bed. “It’s only _been_ five minutes since you asked that. Your parents must have wanted to murder you on trips away. ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ No, we are _not_ there yet and no, I have _not_ thought about the plan yet.”

Kit grinned to himself. Point regained.

“Besides,” Ronan went on. “There are greater considerations than just us, you know. It’s not enough for us to escape _here_. There’s still another job to do.” He paused long enough to slant Kit a very unimpressed look. “Did you think I was here for the social factor?”

Kit looked around the room. “I’m sure you’ve wanted to live out a prison break at some point. Besides, you annoy everyone you meet. I’m just surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.”

“Your imagination is way too overactive. No, put up, shut up and listen up. You noticed the weather right? Weird, oppressive, doesn’t rain? I was here finding out what was up with that –- I got a message to come here.”

“How?” Kit said, putting his hand up to interrupt. “Your message to me took a week and you were the first wizard on the ground here. They don’t _have_ wizards here.”

“They _didn’t_ –but I’m getting ahead of myself. I had an inside source.”

“…you mean to tell me the Powers give you messages?”

“Sometimes. Not the point. The point here is that there is a wizard here. On Ordeal. Except that you know, she disappeared three weeks ago, without finishing what she started, and now the weather working wizardry keeping this planet livable is starting to fail. The people here need someone to blame.” Ronan shrugged. “They’re a little excitable.”

“Are they really going to kill us?”

“Yeah. At least that’s their plan. I have other ideas, of course.” Ronan didn’t sound particularly afraid of this prospect, instead sounding equal parts annoyed and amused. Kit supposed that after having a death threat hanging over your head for a week, you would have to find it blackly funny.

“Well, that’s easy enough. When we get out of here, we’ll go find where she’s gone, get her going, and get out of here. There’s a bunch of wizards on a nearby star who can keep an eye on things while the society here stabilizes.”

“I’m glad you’re here to state the blatantly obvious,” Ronan said. “What would I have done without you?”

“Waited in a prison cell for me to arrive, of course.”

“That’s such a cheap shot!”

That might be true. But what was _also_ true was that Kit had scored another point off Ronan. If he kept this up, he might end up ahead.

 

 

*

“Right,” Ronan said finally, after studying his left hand as if it held the answers to the universe. The wizard dampening bangle had slipped down his forearm while he held his hand upright, moving his thumb thoughtfully, and he slid it back up his wrist absently by sliding two fingers between it and the flesh of his inner arm and pulling up. “I know how we’re going to escape.”

Kit looked across from his serious contemplation of the ceiling. He had determined that it was grey, smooth, and really uninteresting to look at, but he didn’t want to commit to anything too soon. Depending on how bad Ronan’s idea actually was, he could end up looking at it again, this time on his own, for however long it took for someone to decide to change his status from alive to dead. When Ronan didn’t go on, he prompted him.

“Really?”

“You’re going to dislocate my thumbs and pull the dampeners off. Then I’ll remove yours.”

Kit just looked at him.

“That is really dumb.”

“No, getting killed because a species hates wizards is dumb. This is _desperate_. Precision, cousin.”

“So why am I dislocating your thumbs?”

“Because your partner will dislocate my _neck_ if we do it the other way around.” Though Kit could understand the logic behind that particular statement, there was still an overarching illogic towards Ronan’s plan.

“We really could wait for Nita to rescue us.”

It was Ronan’s turn to shoot Kit a look. “No, we really can’t. We decided this, remember?”

“You seriously would rather have dislocated thumbs than have Nita rescue us?”

“Wouldn’t you? Besides, it’s not that bad. We’re _wizards_. Once we’re free, we can heal my thumbs.”

Kit had any number of retorts resting at the tip of his tongue. There was nothing wrong with waiting for Nita to rescue them, given that they had been waiting all of an _hour_. For someone who went on and on and _on_ about how they took a careful and deliberate approach to wizardry, Ronan was very impatient. What was wrong with waiting a whole _two_ hours? Instead of saying all of this, however, all Kit could do is shake his head in silent disbelief.

“Let’s get it over with,” he found himself saying, pushing himself up to a seated position as Ronan sat down next to him, resting his hands between them. This close, Kit could see the little tell-tale signs that made it clear that Ronan was far from calm about this turn of events: the worrying of his bottom lip between his teeth, the way his gaze would flick towards his wrists before darting away again, and how his breath would hitch almost imperceptibly. Still, when he spoke, his voice was level.

“On three?”

Kit dislocated his thumbs on two. Ronan went pale, and Kit felt ill at how the thumbs moved too freely in his hands as he slid the bracelets over Ronan’s wrists. He let Ronan’s hands go and slid backward on the bed, watching Ronan carefully as he straightened up from where he had sagged against the wall, bottom lip clenched between his teeth hard enough that Kit was sure it would bleed.

“I said _three_ ,” Ronan protested, cradling his hands. “That’s the number _after_ two.” He then muttered a sentence in the Speech under his breath, and Kit could feel the bracelets expanding. “You’ll have to pull them off yourself,” Ronan added, leaning back against the wall and looking down at this hands. Sliding the bracelets off was an easy process, and Kit stretched out the kinks in his shoulders, his wrists now free of the cuffs and the familiar feeling of wizardry settling back where it belonged.

“How’re your thumbs?”

Ronan shot Kit a sour look. “Sore.”

“It _is_ your own fault, you know,” Kit felt the need to point out. Ronan’s response was an eloquent rolling of his eyes. “Do you know how to heal them?”

“I thought you did.”

“I thought _you_ were the one with the water affinity. Isn’t that the one good at healing?”

Ronan raised his eyebrows at this. “I see Nita’s been telling stories. Anyway, when have I _ever_ shown a knack for healing?” He looked down at his hands, which were swelling nicely. “This was a really stupid idea,” he said morosely, biting his lip and hissing as he tried to put the thumb of his left hand back into place with his fingers.

“I _told_ you it was,” Kit retorted. “Here, give me that.” The manual offered up a wizardry to relocate Ronan’s thumbs, which seemed easy enough. The resulting soft tissue damage was something that Nita could undoubtedly deal with at a later date –- after all, while Kit had learned enough to do basic wizardry first aid, Nita was far better at this than he was. Actually putting Ronan’s thumbs back into their sockets was a lot grosser than Kit had expected, though some of that probably had to do with Ronan’s scowled indignation putting Kit off his game.

“We’ll get Nita to look at it when she gets here,” Kit said. Ronan had the bad grace of not looking at all reassured by Kit’s attempts at sympathy. “In the meantime, how about you show me your epic jailbreak plan.”

 

*

Ronan’s epic jailbreak plan seemed to involve a lot of running, hiding, swearing and double-backing. Kit wasn’t particularly impressed by it, but didn’t have an alternate plan that was any better.

“Ronan, are you sure we’re heading the right way?” he asked after yet another potential encounter with the prison guards caused them to double back to a previous intersection and hide in a security room to review their options.

“Of course, look it up,” Ronan said, his gaze abstracted as he reviewed his own manual. “Now, if we go right at the next intersection, head up through the ceiling and then drop back down when we can’t go any further we _should_ be clear.”

Kit shot him a very skeptical look. “You can climb with those hands?”

Ronan looked down at his hands, which were swelling impressively. “I dare say I’ll have to, won’t I?” It wasn’t quite the resounding yes that Kit was hoping for, but it was more honest.

“I _told_ you it was a stupid idea.”

Ronan glared at him. “There’s nothing to be done for it now, is there?”

Kit thought about continuing the argument, before deciding it wasn’t worth it. “So, right then up then down?”

“Yeah. Should be easy.”

It wasn’t. While there was a lack of Lescki trying to shoot them following this path -- which was always a plus -- the difficulty lay in crawling through the ceiling. It was narrow, damp in places and enough light was cast to throw shadows on things but not illuminate their path. Kit found the experience of crawling on his hands and knees through all of this particularly horrifying, and only took some solace in the fact that Ronan had the additional problem of longer arms and legs and, therefore, more of him to squeeze in the gaps. Judging by the muttered swearing from up ahead, it did not sound like Ronan was having a fun time of it. The swearing actually helped Kit, in a sense, because it meant that he could focus on untangling what Ronan was saying rather than on how cramped and damp the crawlspace in the ceiling was.

“We’re here,” Ronan whispered after what felt like an eternity, opening the access port and dropping down into a room as softly as someone without the use of their thumbs can lower themselves to the ground, Doc Martens first. Kit dropped down after him, significantly more quietly, and did his best to wipe down his hands on his pants.

“Huh. Prison surveillance room,” Kit said after a minute’s careful listening.

Ronan shot him a very incredulous look. “How can you even know that, there’s nothing here.”

“Watch and learn.” _Hey guys, want to give us a show? Humanoid setting, three dimensional only, current time and date only._

A three dimensional projection rose from the ground near where Kit was standing, showing the intricate warren-nature of the prison.

“It’s embedded in the floor. New technology. I saw it at the Crossings the other week. It costs a lot, but given that you can jailbreak it so that it shows the future of a place as well as the past … it’d be worth it.”

Ronan slanted a very ironic look his way before looking at the projection. “I suppose you’re expecting me to apologize for giving you a hard time about your tech-lust the last time we were at the Crossings? Not likely.” He whistled.

“Wow, when did we get popular?”

Kit looked over to where he was pointing.

“Probably the time when we escaped from a secure prison cell? Why are they all gathered _there_?” he asked, finger pointing at one particular room where a good number of Lescki were gathered, watching one particular door.

“You’ll find that’s the exit,” Ronan answered. “If we want to leave, we _have_ to go through there.”

“Are you _sure_ we can’t teleport out?”

“ _Yes_. That’s how they found me the first time, you know. There’s a surveillance system in place. You use wizardry, you get picked up on it. There’s these dead spots in it, and I’ve set up a base in one of them but I got picked up before I could do much.” Ronan folded his arms. “We want to get out, that’s our way out.”

“How _did_ they capture you?” Kit said. “And what are you doing here? You just _disappeared_ and you know, at first we figured you were sulking.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. So what _did_ happen?”

“I just told you. Started poking around to find out what happened, used wizardry outside of a dead zone, got picked up and -- _hey_!” Kit turned around to look at the projection that Ronan was watching in time to see what appeared to be laser fire arc across the screen, knocking the Lescki to the ground. After a minute, a girl stepped into view before firing at something off-screen.

“That’s my _sister_ \--!” Kit blurted out.

“It surely is,” Ronan replied. “Want to go meet her? Before she wipes out the entire prison, I mean.”

Kit was already heading for the door.

 

 

*

By the time Kit and Ronan had arrived, Carmela had done an admirable job stunning what appeared to be half the security of the prison, along with destroying the robotic weaponry that must have been sent in after Kit and Ronan stopped watching. She whirled on them, hair curler at the ready, before dropping it.

“You two are _really_ hard to find,” she said.

“Is Nita with you?” Ronan asked after a moment spent staring at the wreckage around him.

“No, she’s with Dairine. Something came up on Wellakh that they’re taking care of -- not that they’d tell _me_ what it was.” Carmela sounded quite put out at this. “And so when I went looking for where you were, little brother, and the TV said you were in _prison_ …” She grinned. “So aren’t you going to thank me?”

“No,” Kit said. “Carmela, you can’t _be_ here! It’s not safe for you! They were going to kill us for being wizards!”

“Fortunately for us all, I’m not one.”

“That’s not the point! They’ll kill you too! Ronan, tell her!”

Ronan, who was wearing the carefully blank look of someone who knew that he was about to be dragged into a sibling quarrel whether he liked it or not, instead nodded his head at the other side of the room. “Exit’s that way. We can continue this later.”

The two Rodriguez siblings looked like they were about to continue their argument until one of the aliens that Carmela had stunned started to stir. “ _Now_ ,” Ronan added. Carmela put her curling iron into a pouch hanging from her belt and they raced through the room, holding their breath as they passed the sleeping security aliens.

 

 

*

Ronan guided them to where he had set himself up: an underground cave not too far away from the prison. Kit checked his manual to find out if there was an explanation for the patchy coverage of the surveillance system, but the manual was silent on the issue. That was unfortunate; it would have been useful to know why so that he could exploit it further. As Carmela unpacked her things, Kit wondered what the Powers were thinking directing Carmela to their rescue.

 _You noticed that too,_ Ronan commented. He was worrying at his bottom lip again, considering Carmela from behind that fall of dark hair. _For someone who isn’t a wizard she keeps showing up but …_

_The Powers move in mysterious ways?_

Ronan sighed mentally. _You said it, cousin. They really do._

“I know you two are talking,” Carmela interjected. “You make that face.”

“What face?” Kit found himself asking. He saw Ronan shaking his head in warning.

“If I _told_ you, you’d stop doing it,” Carmela said pertly. “Now, want to tell me what’s going on?”

Kit sat down on the ground, stretching his legs out and leaning against the cool stone wall. Glancing around, he noticed with some annoyance that Carmela had ‘borrowed’ his portable refrigeration unit, which was filled with her preferred milkshakes, assorted contraband edible products and something that he thought was possibly the leftovers of last night’s dinner. _Mama is going to be so mad,_ he thought, as he filled her in on the situation.

“Wow,” Carmela said finally. “That’s a mess. What are we doing next?”

“We?” Kit asked. “There is no we. You are going home while Ronan and I take care of it.”

“You?” Carmela retorted, arching her eyebrow. “Who was the one who rescued you from prison? Who is the only competent one here? Me! You can’t send me home, little brother, because _you need me._ ” She emphasised the last three words by jabbing at Kit’s general direction with her index finger.

“Weren’t you listening? They’re going to kill people! You’re not a wizard, you can’t defend yourself from it!”

“They’re killing _wizards_. They won’t even care about _moi_.”

“That could change!”

“So what. I can defend myself. Besides, _Ronan_ wants me here. Right, Ronan?”

Both of the Rodriguez siblings turned to Ronan, who apparently hadn’t heard anything of what they had just said. He was staring into space again, his head cocked and his expression abstracted.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

“Hear what?” Kit asked.

“Did you hear what we were saying?” Carmela added.

Ronan blinked. “You guys were saying something?”

Kit squinted at Ronan, frowning. Underneath all the dirt, blood, stubble and that ridiculous charismatic effect that he _hoped_ Ronan had no idea he exuded, Ronan was very pale with dark shadows under his eyes.

“Uh, Ronan, when were you arrested?”

Ronan scowled as he thought about it. “Three hours after I arrived.”

“Oookay,” Kit breathed. The brittle energy that had animated Ronan during their escape had seemed at odds with this spacey, abstracted version of Ronan, but Ronan’s answer explained quite a bit. “Carmela, did you bring my sleeping bag?”

“Yeah, it’s just here,” Carmela got up from her chair and tossed one to Ronan who caught it with the instinctive skill of a trained sportsman despite not having the use of his thumbs, and then looked surprised at what he held in his hands.

“It’s a sleeping bag. You use it for sleeping in. Just take your boots off first, mama will be really mad if you smear mud on it.” Carmela prompted Ronan as he made no further move.

“Oh. Yeah.” Ronan unwrapped the sleeping bag, rolled it out and sat on it while fumbling at the shoelaces of his Doc Martens with his fingers. Kit moved to give him a hand, only to be warned off when Ronan shot him a warning glance through his hair. Instead he started going through what Carmela had brought with her and stashed in the cave. She was surprisingly well set up. Food, clothes, _toiletries_ … Kit was struck with the horrible realization that honestly, Carmela was more prepared for this rescue mission than he was, and made a face. It just wasn’t _fair_.

“Okay, you can stop touching all my things and look back now,” Carmela interrupted. “He’s mastered the sleeping bag.” Kit turned around and took his seat on the floor back up. He had expected some kind of smart remark from Ronan, but Kit supposed it would be hard to be quick witted if you were sleeping on a leather jacket in a sleeping bag that had a cartoon dinosaur emblazoned on it. A quick glance around meant that Kit picked up where the boots were, so at the very least Ronan had gotten those off.

“What I want to know is how he’s _sleeping_ in his jeans,” Kit remarked after a minute.

Carmela shuddered. “I know I couldn’t. We could wake him up and ask him.”

Kit glanced over at Ronan, who had settled into the slack, loose-limbed sleep of the utterly exhausted. Some people looked younger or more innocent asleep. Ronan just looked unsettlingly absent. It was strange how much Ronan’s personality animated his face. Kit turned back to Carmela. “You could _try_. I don’t think he’s waking up for anything.”

“Yeah, I know.” The look Carmela gave Kit was very shrewd. “So … they didn’t do anything to you, right?”

It took Kit a moment to catch up with the change of conversation. “No,” he said. “Sure they hit me when I resisted arrest but after they slapped the anti-wizardry handcuffs on it’s not like I could have done _much_.”

“How _did_ they get them on you?” Carmela wondered. “It’s not like they could have walked up to you, slipped them on and then gone ‘Aha! Now we have you!’, is it?”

Kit shot her a very sour look. “There was a firefight going on and I got knocked out _so you know_. I woke up when they put the handcuffs on, tried to break away and then they hit me.”

He couldn’t really deny that they _hadn’t_ said ‘Now we have you!’. That was, after all, the gist of what they _had_ said. At the time he had thought it was terribly cliched; he didn’t need Carmela to tell him what he already knew.

“Which shift did you want?” he asked instead. Carmela shot him a Look but didn’t take the point further.

“Second.”

“Are you sure? It’s the worst one.”

“Sure I am.” While Carmela’s voice seemed easy enough, Kit could hear the steel underneath; Carmela _would_ take the second shift, Kit _would_ take the first shift and there was very little he could do to change her mind. “I’ll wake Ronan for the third.”

“With your tongue?”

Kit was quite put out when Carmela burst out laughing.

“Good night, Kit,” she said after recovering, fishing out her sleeping bag and setting it up on the ground. “Remember to wake me.” After a minute, she added graciously, “You may use my chair.”

Kit, who was already sitting in it, just grinned. “Good night, Carmela.”

 

 

*

Ronan dreamed, and knew that he was dreaming.

He was in Castle Matrix, and it was dark. He didn’t need light though to identify where he was, as he could feel the castle’s strong affinity for water pull at his own. Normally, it was a pleasant pull, such as when you stretch out a stiff muscle. Visiting Castle Matrix normally was like swimming in the ocean, surrounded by the element that he knew and that knew him well. But now it had changed. He could feel it changing him, whispering to him things that he could hear if only he closed his eyes and listened. Closed his eyes, forgot what it meant to be Ronan Nolan, Irish wizard, and became something deep and dark and utterly unfettered by things like human consciousness. The Irish Sea called to him here, in a voice it never had before. Previously an emotionless, unknowable unchanging voice that had known him all his life, now the Irish Sea wanted to not only possess him, but _consume_ him.

For the first time in his life, Ronan was afraid of the sea.

“I don’t understand,” he breathed, trying in vain to stop his voice from cracking. “What do you want me to know?”

It spoke then of a penance by way of sacrifice, of _punishment_ , of a divine avenger descending from the sky to smite him if he failed -- and he (would fail)(is failing)( _will fail_ ) -- for having the temerity of transgressing in the grounds of the gods. The avenger was faceless behind the helmet, the sword alight with fire, the armor gleaming with starlight. Ronan knew though that if he reached out and took the helmet off, he would see his own face.

“No, that’s not - He’s not like that at all,” Ronan said. The darkness swallowed his feeble words. “He’s a _defender_ , not an _revenger_.”

It didn’t listen, though. It whispered to him that it was far safer in here, with it. _He_ should know; he bore the scars of what it meant to be (used)(ill-used)(used up)(cast aside) by the machinations of beings beyond his comprehension, he should stay here with it and they could protect each other.

“No, that wasn’t how it was either,” Ronan said. He balled his hands in fists, feeling his nails cut into the flesh of his palms. “You’ve been told a whole bunch of lies. And I know Who told you them. It’s always been afraid of what Its brother could do if the truth were allowed out.”

He could feel it pull at him, at his affinities, and he knew that if he had listened to Shaun when he told Ronan that he would _need_ his sensitivities more than his weaponry one day, he might be able to understand what was going on. Instead, he dug in his heels, resisting through sheer will, as it pulled at him, _needed_ him to complete it, its need, sorrow and anger suffocating him. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe _he couldn’t breathe_ \--

\-- And then he saw Carmela, her face lit up by the flashlight she was using to read what looked to be a Cosmo magazine and her hair falling across her face like a curtain. She was staring at him, wide eyed with surprise, as he gasped like a landed fish.

“Bad dream?” she asked. Ronan nodded, sitting up and wincing at the pain in his chest as it competed with the burn from both hands. The scar from where the Spear pierced his chest always ached when he was tired; it was a small price to pay for being alive, Ronan supposed.

His gaze flitted around the cave.

Kit, curled up on his side like a scared child, clinging to his makeshift pillow in his sleep. Carmela, sitting in her fold up chair, closing her magazine and tucking it back into her overnight bag. Kit’s treasured portable refrigeration unit casting a blocky shadow on the wall behind it. The smooth cave walls, made that way through the passage of water long ago.

Ronan closed his eyes and felt the storm pressing against him, the pressure always building despite the desperate attempts that had been made to bleed off some of the raw fury contained in that storm before it became the catastrophe it promised to be. It, coupled with the dream, made him uneasy. He was already on edge with Kit’s close proximity -- something that he was pointedly not considering until after all this was resolved -- and it seemed that external forces were all but screaming at him that _something would change_.

“Now that we’re alone, you and I need to talk. Specifically, you and I need to talk about your intentions towards my little brother.”

At this, Ronan opened his eyes to frown in consternation at Carmela. Did they really have to talk about this now? He thought about changing the subject, but Carmela had that set to her jaw that meant that she would not be swayed. He set everything else aside and focused on the current conversation to hand.

“What are you talking about?”

Carmela smiled at this. Ronan was put in the mind of a large jungle cat. “You sent a message to him. Just him. Asking him to rescue you. Why not Nita? I love my little brother dearly, but _really_? That’s almost action-adventure romance material there.”

Ronan made a face. The only thing worse than being predictable was being told that you were predictable.

“You’re being too oblique,” Carmela told him, her voice kind. “He’s stupid. You have to tell him outright.” Ronan frowned, looking for the trick in this. “I give you permission to try and convince him to kiss you,” she added graciously.

“I didn’t know I needed your permission to do _anything_ ,” he rallied desperately. Carmela raised her eyebrows.

“You keep believing that. Oh, and it’s your turn to keep watch.”

In retrospect, Ronan really should have seen that coming. Still, he had to admit that Carmela had given him an out -- it was very unlikely that he was going to sleep at the moment, and he might as well be _useful_. As such, he merely made a face as Carmela suggested that he use this time to clean himself up while she settled into her sleeping bag, and restrained himself to just rolling his eyes after Carmela told him he wasn’t to use her director’s chair while she was asleep despite his already being seated in it.

“I meant it about Kit,” Carmela said after she was settled. Ronan ignored her by reading Cosmo until her breathing evened out

 

 

*

“Rise and shine!” Ronan announced the next morning, waking Kit up from a disquieting dream where he was standing in front of a machine -- the most important machine -- and no matter what he said he couldn’t make himself understood. Kit noted with some annoyance that Ronan had cleaned himself up while both Carmela and Kit were asleep, and had splinted his thumbs with a clever little wizardry that looked like it reduced the swelling at the same time. That, and his bad dream, resulted in Kit rolling over and telling Ronan exactly what he thought about Ronan’s enthusiasm by way of hand gestures.

“What would mama say if she saw that?” Carmela teased, sitting up and pushing her hair off her face.

“Probably that you’re a bad influence,” Kit retorted and stuck out his tongue.

“Ah, maturity,” Carmela deadpanned.

“You can’t talk,” Kit shot back.

“I am _always_ mature and sensible.”

“You mean deluded.”

“I’m the deluded one?”

Ronan watched the unfolding argument with the mild interest of someone watching a vaguely entertaining television show. Kit noticed this and rolled his eyes in annoyance.

“You find this funny, don’t you?”

“Of course.” Ronan didn’t even have the good grace to look embarrassed at being caught out. “I _was_ going to interrupt your sibling bonding session to ask ‘what are we going to do now?’ but honestly I doubt either of you would hear me.”

It was Carmela’s turn to roll her eyes. “We’re going to find this missing wizard and fix the weather machine.”

“We don’t even know where all that is,” Kit pointed out. Then the second half of her sentence caught up with him. “Wait, a machine? How do you -- you can’t know that.”

“And I know where she is.” Carmela smiled. “I do my homework.”

“She’s got you there,” Ronan said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Well then, Carmela, we’re in your hands.”

“Powers help us all,” Kit muttered under his breath.

“I heard that,” Carmela chimed in sweetly. “But out of the _goodness of my heart_ I will let it slide with only a few weeks of torment.” Then she added, “But I shan’t let you use the handy map the TV gave you. You two will just have to stay behind me and think about what you’ve done.”

She and Ronan exchanged looks that Kit couldn’t interpret. Kit found that very annoying.

 *

As Carmela led the way into the depths of the caves guided by, of all things, a TV guide, Kit and Ronan traipsed along behind, eerily silent. Kit stole glances at him every so often. Finally, the silence had dragged on long enough that he had to speak.

“Ronan,” Kit opened carefully. Ronan stopped and looked at him. “I know it’s none of my business --”

“Undoubtedly,” Ronan agreed easily.

“-- and I probably shouldn’t say anything --”

“So why are you?”

“Ronan! Let me finish!”

Ronan rolled his eyes and mimed zipping his mouth closed.

“ _Finally_. It’s about you and Carmela.”

Ronan frowned in response, but didn’t say anything.

“Are you -- you’d better _not_ be interested in her!” Kit said in a rush. “I know she’s dated guys before, but you’ve dated a lot more, and you live in a different _continent_ and half the time you’re a jerk that _I_ don’t know what you’re thinking so why would _she_ know and you’ll just hurt her.”

Ronan’s expression moved from surprise through bewilderment, took a right turn into frustration and finally settled on amused.

“Well?”

“Oh, you’re finished?” Ronan raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t want to interrupt. You had a good run there.”

“Can you take this seriously?”

“No? It’s stupid. Carmela and I have an arrangement.”

“An arrangement?”

“Yes. We’ve decided to bury our smouldering sexual tension out of concern that you might not be able to cope with it.”

Kit was pretty sure that Ronan was joking. He punched him on the arm instead.

“What’s going on?” Carmela asked.

“Oh, Kit wants to know if we’ll be french kissing any time soon,” Ronan said. Kit spluttered.

“I don’t want to know what you plan to do with my little brother.”

It was Ronan’s turn to splutter.

“See! It’s things like that that make any reasonable person think you two have a - a thing!” Kit interjected. Carmela gave him a long-suffering look.

“You’ll work it out, little brother,” she said, pity dripping from her every word as she patted him on his shoulder. Kit made a face at her and glanced over at Ronan for help. Unfortunately, judging by Ronan’s expression and what appeared to be a fading blush, it was very unlikely that Ronan was going to be of any help whatsoever. Kit chalked this up to Ronan being nowhere near as cool as he’d like to be. He made a note to warn Ronan about precision in his language around Carmela in future, when the two of them were alone.

“So are you...?” he asked again, after Carmela _finally_ started leading again.

“We’ve covered this,” Ronan replied, heaving an impatient sigh. “ _No_. Carmela and I are not interested in each other. At _all_.”

“Then what are you two _talking_ about,” Kit hissed.

“It’s not something you need to know, Kit.”

It wasn’t a lie, not really. But the way that Ronan’s eyes slid off Kit to gaze somewhere past his shoulder made it clear that it wasn’t the complete truth either. Kit filed _that_ away, along with the blush from earlier and the general abstracted air he had all the time now. Ronan was acting _strange_ , even more so than he normally was.

*

“We’re here!” Carmela announced. “Or … at least we’re here where you guys have to crack open some wizardry barrier thingy.” Kit looked up from his contemplation of how weird everyone was around him and how he was possibly the only sane and sensible person on this expedition to notice that Carmela was, in fact, quite right. If he squinted, he could see through the hazy white light the barrier cast up, and see what appeared to be a large cylinder with a number of limbs spiralling out from it, like a spider with far too many legs, or a transport nexus. Behind the machine, or at least what little he could see from around the cylinder, stood what he thought was a young female Lescka, still with her immature iridescent blue shell, unmistakably frozen in stasis. With the color of her carapace in mind, Kit pushed his estimate for her age down to younger than Dairine, and he whistled softly through his teeth.

“She’s young,” Ronan remarked, coming up behind him. “Really young.”

Carmela turned to him. “So … she’s what? Dairine’s age?”

“Younger,” Kit said heavily. “Dairine was ten. She’d be around eight or nine, by our reckoning.”

“Wizards _come_ that young?” Carmela’s eyes were wide.

“They can come younger,” Ronan said, chewing his bottom lip. “It all depends on what they’re being faced with. For her to be so young … she’ll be a force to be reckoned with once this gets unstuck.”

“Which is why it _is_ stuck,” Kit added. “The Lone Power _likes_ cutting off its greatest threats early. Dairine was one.”

“So, let’s get on with it! Break that barrier down, get her Ordeal finished and let’s kick the Lone Power’s butt off this world once and for all!”

Carmela’s enthusiasm was infectious, and Kit grinned as he put his hand up and suggested to the barrier that he was a friend. Fortunately for him, the barrier was easily convinced, giving under his hand.

Unfortunately, the occupant in the cave was not so easily convinced. She whipped around, a chain wrapped around her claw. There they stood: the younger alien wizard twitching as the chain glowed with the power of a wizard with Ordeal strength, Carmela reaching down for her curling iron, Ronan muttering a string of syllables for a shield and Kit wondering what the best way to defuse the situation was. After coming up blank, he stepped into the cave, ignoring Carmela’s hissed instructions to get back where he was.

“Hey! Hey. It’s okay. It’s _okay_ ,” Kit said, his hands up in surrender. The other wizard stared at him, her antennae twitching in what he was fairly sure was anxiety. “We’re wizards, and we’re here to help.”

Carmela, thankfully, said nothing to correct this.

“I’m Kit, that’s Carmela and over there’s Ronan,” Kit continued. Ronan, who had the strange expression of someone who had encountered something they hadn’t expected to meet and it wasn’t at all as they thought, stepped forward.

“We’ve been talking for a while, haven’t we? Or at least you’ve been trying. I’m not really great at that … kind … of stuff.”

_No, really? If you can’t blow it up, you aren’t even interested!_

He could hear Ronan heave a sigh. _While I could question your sense of timing, fine. I’ll work on becoming a more well rounded wizard when I get home. Give me a few weeks and I’ll be so mystical you won’t even know me._

 _Um..._ interrupted a third voice. _What are you talking about?_

Carmela laughed. “You should see your faces. Caught out, huh? Now start talking aloud so that us non wizards can listen in.” She then turned to the younger alien. “Don’t mind them. They’re boys. They can’t help being stupid.”

“Thank you, Carmela,” Kit muttered.

“It’s true.” Carmela accompanied this with a grin. “They keep me around to stop them doing stupid things, otherwise they’ll do things like impale themselves or get possessed by doormat boyfriends from Mars.”

“Carmela,” Ronan pointed out reasonably. “You were there for the first one.”

“Shut up, Ronan,” Kit interjected. “Sorry, cousin. We’re being rude. What are you called?”

The response was something that had a lot of clicking, hissing and pheromones.

“Uh …” Ronan replied.

“Zetae?” Kit asked. “Do you mind if we call you that? We aren’t physiologically equipped to say all that.”

“T-t-that’s fine,” Zetae replied. “I - I - I don’t -- I don’t mind.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Zetae,” Carmela said.

“Well then, Zetae,” Ronan said aloud, to the younger wizard, who was fidgeting with her mandibles in a way that the manual filled Kit in meant that she was very apprehensive. “Kit and I, we’re just here to help you. It’s _your_ Ordeal, we’re just the ones … giving it a shove so you can finish it off. How can we help?”

“I don’t know how you can help,” Zetae replied in her hesitant, stuttering way. “There’s so much information in my brain that I can’t make sense of it all. There’s _too much_ , and _none_ of it is what we were taught.”

“I’m not surprised,” Kit remarked to Ronan. “I really don’t know how you _memorize_ the manual.”

Ronan didn’t take the bait. “Yeah, I know. And you’ve been told some stuff that isn’t true all your life. It’s not your fault, but … you haven’t failed, okay? You just got your people mixed up.”

Kit and Carmela exchanged looks.

“As for how we can help, Kit’s specialty is machines. Not a machine out there that Kit can’t charm into doing anything he wants. As for me, you and I can split the weather stuff between us. Carmela, on the other hand, can do anything she wants to. The Manual can seem really confusing at first, especially with all the information crammed into your brain that you think it can’t possibly keep it all. It can. It just takes a bit of practice.”

“Ronan, you’re talking too much,” Kit pointed out.

Zetae looked overwhelmed, but in the way where you previously didn’t think you had any options and now you had entirely too _many_ and the choosing of one was scary of itself.

“It’s okay,” she said finally. “I think I understand what he means. And then, in a rush, “I’m so sorry about the dreams. I was just so _afraid_. I didn’t know what to do and ... I knew I had failed everyone. I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

“No problem,” Kit said. “We’ve all been there. That’s why us wizards work better together than alone. We can help each other out.”

“But … I’m the only wizard here. When you all leave, I’ll be alone,” Zetae pointed out.

“No, you won’t. You may be the only wizard here. But you can go visit other wizards, and other wizards can visit you. Being a wizard isn’t just about defeating the Lone Power, though that is a part of it. It’s about having family all over the galaxy. Wherever you go, you’ll always have somewhere to call home.”

“Oh...” Zetae breathed. “That would be nice.”

“Oh, it’s right grand until someone comes along needing you to fix something and you’re doing ten things before breakfast and then your tea gets cold,” Ronan added cheerfully. “But sometimes you’re the one needing something fixed. So today’s your turn. Tomorrow you’ll be helping someone else. We’re family, that’s what we do. So don’t you feel bad about needing help, you hear?”

“But,” Kit interrupted. “You have to tell us how we can help.” While Kit wanted to just start fixing the weather working machine then and now, he knew better than that. Interfering with another wizard’s Ordeal like that would be a spectacularly bad mistake, and while they were obviously here to assist, how they were to assist was yet to be determined.

“Um,” Zetae said. “What’s wrong with the machine? I couldn’t make it work.”

Kit listened, closing his eyes. _Come on, big guy, what’s up?_ He got an overwhelming sense of arthritic age, but nothing to suggest that it couldn’t be fixed, given enough time.

“It’s just old,” he said. “We can fix it up together if you want.”

“Can you fix it?” Zetae asked. Something warned Kit away from his instinctive answer of of course.

“Want to take a look at it, see what you think?” he said instead. “You’re the native species here.”

Zetae was already backing away. “No!” she said, louder than she’d been any time previously. “You fix it! I can’t! Not me! It’s a sin, we mustn’t -- but we must -- oh what do I do?”

The three humans looked at one another: Kit with consternation, Carmela with bemusement and Ronan dawning understanding.

“Let’s take five,” Carmela said. “Zetae, you want to come with me? We can take a walk. Kit told me a bit about your world and what’s going on. Maybe I know someone who can help. What do you say?”

Zetae looked at Carmela, glanced fearfully back at the machine, and then agreed with a jerky nod.

 *

Ronan was scanning through the entry on weather wizardries. It sounded relatively complex, even with a wizard with Ordeal level strength. He was musing his way through the way to calculate the air pressure necessary to control storms when he sensed another person nearby.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hello,” Zetae replied.

“Slipped away from Carmela?”

“No! Never. Carmela’s _wonderful_.”

“And not a wizard.” It was from Zetae’s startled reaction that Ronan knew he was onto something. “As far away from being involved with the Powers, like we are, as possible. Except you know that’s wrong too, because the Manual told you otherwise.”

“I don’t know what’s right,” she sighed after a long silence. “Everyone knows that it’s best not to draw attention to yourself. Your Powers … they don’t care about _our_ lives. They burn our souls up and discard our remains afterward. And wizards … all they’re good for is dying as quickly as possible. Before they spread their sickness on everyone else and everyone’s souls are taken away.”

“And now?”

“Now … I don’t _know_. You’re _old_ \--”

Ronan made a face at being called old before finishing secondary school.

“And the Manual told me about you earlier. All of you. And you all do _good_ things, _without_ having to die for it.”

Ronan made another face.

“And why are you making those expressions?”

“Uh,” Ronan said intelligently. “Never mind.”

Zetae was silent for a minute. “It’s not the dying I’m afraid of,” she said finally. “It’s … I don’t want to disappear. And when I saw the machine, all I could think of were the stories we’re told about Powers and what they do to us. I couldn’t do it … but I couldn’t let someone come along and break it. So …”

“You put a barrier up, went into stasis and waited for a wizard to show up to do it for you.”

Zetae was silent.

“So what are you going to do now?”

“Me? What do you mean?”

“You’re still on Ordeal. You can’t just give it to Kit and I to fix. We can help you, support you. But we can’t do it for you.”

“But I _can’t_ ,” she said, nearly wailing. “You can do it.”

“The wizardry to fix your world _needs_ a native wizard. You are the only person in the universe who is the answer to this.” Ronan took a breath, let it out slowly. “I can’t make you do it. If you don’t, then Kit and I will do it alone. And you will stop being a wizard.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?”

It was Ronan’s turn to be silent. It was possible for Kit and Ronan to do it together, if they absolutely had to, but it would be a working neither of them would walk away from unscathed. Further, if it failed -- which it could, given that the world wouldn’t recognize them as being native to it -- then more people would die than if they had left it alone. He wanted to say all of this, to spell it out to Zetae as clearly as he could the risks she was exposing everyone to by refusing. But he knew that this wouldn’t do any good. It was a realization Zetae would have to come to herself.

“I don’t _want_ to,” she said.

“Yes, you do” Carmela said from further down the caves. “Wow, these things echo, don’t they?” She made her way up to where Ronan and Zetae were standing. “Look, Ronan’s right because wizards don’t run away from things. And he’s wrong because _you_ don’t run away from things either! Sure you get scared, and who wouldn’t! You should be scared! But I also know that while you’re afraid I know that when push comes to shove, you’ll be there. You came down here all by yourself! Even after everything you’ve been told about wizardry!!”

Zetae was staring at Carmela in shock.

“And that’s how I know you’ll come through. Because you’re as brave as you are cute, and you are seriously a cutie. When we’re done here, I’ll introduce you to all my friends and they’ll help you out with making this planet better, got it? I already know that one of them is _super_ keen to talk to you.”

Zetae didn't look convinced.

"If you really don't want to," Ronan said. "You can't be made to. If you choose ... you can choose to not be a wizard. The Powers don't sacrifice lives for wizardry. If you choose to reject your wizardry, it can't stay with you, and Kit and I will do what we have to. But it won't be as good as if you were doing it. You were chosen because you are the best, and only, answer to this problem."

After he finished speaking, there was a very tense silence, where no one knew what really to say.

“It has to be me, doesn’t it?” Zetae said finally, breaking the silence. She didn’t sound happy about it. “Please fix the machine for me.” Her voice shook. “I think I want to be alone for a bit.” She teleported out.

Ronan and Carmela looked at one another.

“You want to go after her?” Ronan said.

“No. She’ll come back when she’s finished having a sulk.”

Ronan nodded. “Yeah, probably. She’s got a lot to work her way through.”

“She’s a tough cookie,” Carmela said. “Sure, she’s all self-effacing, but she got all the way here from the other side of the planet without getting caught. Unlike _some_ people.”

Ronan frowned. “Yeah, and if I hadn’t been, then Kit and you wouldn’t be here. Things happen for a reason, you know.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Anyway, we should go back to where Kit is. Rescue the poor machine from him.”

 

 

*

When Zetae didn’t return after an hour, Carmela headed off to look for her while Ronan and Kit kept working. Kit, absorbed in the intricacies of rewiring the augmentation interface on the weather machine, grunted in what could be an acknowledgement.

It wasn’t.

“Carmela? You’re being really quiet...”

Ronan snickered. “She left ages ago. You really are terrible at multitasking.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, I’m sure you think that. Now, about this weather working machine. Do you know what’s wrong with it?”

Kit listened a minute. “It’s just … old. Old and parts aren’t working as well as they could. We could fix it up easy enough, it’s just that no one has. Not to mention, we’d have to tweak it a bit to recognize us. We’re not native, you know.”

“Yes, I did.”

Kit punched him. “Stop being a smart ass and start helping, would you?”

Ronan’s response was to roll his eyes, fish out a toolkit from where Carmela had left it, and start working. Kit watched for a minute before catching his hand.

“Not that one. Try this one instead.” Ronan froze for a minute, before putting his hand where Kit guided him to.

“How about you tell me where I should be putting things, at least until I get my head around it,” Ronan muttered.

“Sure.”

Kit decided that Ronan was acting _very_ strangely. The fact that Ronan didn’t say anything after that was also unusual. Ronan was far more inclined to fill empty spaces with words than Kit was. Moreover, this wasn’t a comfortable silence between two wizards working on a shared project. Instead it was tense and ached to be filled with something, _anything_.

“So, you called me when you were in trouble? Why me?”

“You heard Carmela. Nita’s off world, and I couldn’t ask _Darryl_ to get in here.”

Kit conceded that with a nod. While it was likely that Darryl would do his best to come out to rescue Ronan, it would hurt Darryl to be this far away from Earth. Ronan knew that as well.

“Still,” Kit mused. “You’ve been a wizard longer than Nita and I. I know not everyone ends up in a partnership right away but … surely you’ve had a partner before.”

“Nothing so like,” Ronan muttered absently, fiddling with the wires that powered the weather working device.

“Why not?”

 _A flare of light, ripping out of his chest and spilling out into the air above him, coalescing into Something that he could both see and not see, and all he could think was “oh, all of that could fit inside me?”_ Kit sucked in a breath in surprise, rather grateful for the fact that Ronan’s attention was focused on the part of the machine that dealt with the ocean and tides. While he had been used to these kinds of intuitive flashes from Nita -- it came with being her partner, after all -- he and Ronan had only had this kind of rapport once. At the time Kit had assumed that it had to do with Nita’s lingering crush on Ronan, of a relationship ended untidily because of the awe-inspiring Power that had been resting in Ronan’s soul. Still, this was interesting or unsettling; Kit wasn’t sure which.

Ronan shrugged. “It just never came up.” He seemed utterly unaware of what was going on, in that annoyingly opaque way where he may either know or have no idea at all. Kit wished that Nita was here to sort out just what was going on. She was always better at reading Ronan than he was. “I think I’ve finished the tides part, want to take a look?”

Kit glanced over the wiring, closing his eyes and letting it speak to him. It ached to be useful in a way that Kit associated with long-discarded factory machinery - something that used to have a purpose and was grand with it, but that purpose had been forgotten and swept aside long ago. The wires whispered to him of waves and currents, of unfathomable ocean depths and the chill crushing darkness of the water pressing against his skin. They _sang_ in a song that Kit had only heard once, the Song of the Twelve, only nothing like that at all. Something in the same family at least, if not necessarily the same song. He gave Ronan a startled look.

“Oh,” Ronan breathed. “Oh, I see now.”

“You see what?” Kit demanded. “Other than getting your sea stuff all over this.”

Ronan grinned. “I do like to mark my territory.”

Kit groaned as he realized the connotations of this. “We can’t take you anywhere. Need I remind you that there’s a _nine year old_ wizard here.”

“Actually, she’s not,” Ronan pointed out. “Otherwise Carmela would be here rather than off looking for her.”

“I meant in general.”

Ronan shrugged. “It’ll be fine. No one’s going to get too fussed about it; I’m supposed to be the rakish older man.”

Kit punched him on the shoulder.

“You mean a _flake_. What’s with all the weird behavior lately? And don’t just blame it on your picking up on whatever anxieties Zetae was putting out either.”

Ronan looked at him carefully, his lip caught between his teeth before he asked “What are you doing after this is over?”

“...uh, going home?” This wasn’t the response that Ronan was expecting, from the way his lips pressed together.

Then he exploded. “Oh, for _God’s_ sake! I’m asking you out, you idiot!”

“Now?”

“I think we can wait a few hours before we actually do anything, but _yes_.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Kit said finally. “Uh. Nothing. Saturday good for you?” He then shook his head in genial disbelief. “Are you seriously telling me that you’ve been acting weird because you had a _crush_ on me?”

“Shut _up_ ,” Ronan groused. “It wasn’t like your sister made it better.”

“She rarely does. So, Saturday?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine. We’ll sort out a time later.” There was a moment of irritated silence. “This is why it took so long for you two to start dating. Did she have to use a slideshow presentation?”

“No!”

“I bet she _did_. Knowing Nita, there would have been footnotes. Were there footnotes? Of course there were. And there would have been a digression into the chemical process behind it all and …”

“ _Augh_!”

It was then that Carmela returned with Zetae in tow. Over Zetae’s head, Carmela’s eyes went wide and then a complicated exchange of expressions took place between her and Ronan. She finally settled on smug triumph, and Ronan resignation. Kit decided he didn’t want to know.

“You all right?” Kit asked Zetae instead.

“I’m okay.” And then she said again, “I’m okay,” as if to reassure herself that it really would be okay. “I think I’m ready.” Ronan stood up at this, stepping closer to the weather working machine, near where Kit was standing. Zetae moved to stand between them, gazing with fierce determination ahead of her.

“Do you still want our help?” Ronan asked.

Zetae nodded. “If you’re willing.”

“We’re willing,” Kit said. “Just tell us where you need us and we’ll be there. It’s your show, you call the shots.”

“Um …” Zetae paused to catch her breath. “I need someone to help me with the weather parts, and someone to talk to the machine. So that’s … Ronan helping me and Kit talking to the machine?”

“Sounds about right,” Ronan said. “I’m fine with that.”

“Me too. Does the ground suit?” Kit asked. Zetae gazed at the machine a minute.

“Yes.” She took a breath, and then began speaking in the Speech. Her words were hesitant at first, and Ronan and Kit exchanged worried looks over her head, but as she became more confident and her words more decisive, he could feel the machine respond to her.

 _Come on,_ Kit cajoled it. _We spent a lot of time fixing you back up and we can do more, but you’ve got to work with us here. Let us help you._ He could hear Zetae describing the weather patterns of her planet and how they should be, and he could hear Ronan telling the weather off when it didn’t do as Zetae wanted. Kit couldn’t spare too much attention to how they were bringing about the change, as he had to teach the machine to recognize what they were doing and to replicate it. _See? See what they’re doing? You know you want to do that too. You know you can do it better than they can, because that’s your function. That’s what you are made for, and you’re a good machine that likes to do what it is made for._ He realized that he was treating the machine like it was a particularly loyal dog, and there was a pang of loss for Ponch -- not eased even after all this time -- but Ponch would have liked what they were doing. _See how they’re controlling the air pressures, how about you take control of that for them. You heard how it should be, and you remember how it should be._

As Kit guided the machine to take over things that Zetae and Ronan were managing, he could feel the machine gain more awareness, knowing that _this_ was what it was made to do and it was good that it could do it. As the machine became more aware, it also became aware of the three wizards working with it, and it gradually eased them out.

Finally, it was done. Kit opened his eyes and steadied Zetae, who was very unstable on her feet. Ronan had that dazed look that he took when he reached his limits and, judging by the way that Carmela hurried over to prop up Kit’s shoulder, he didn’t look much better.

“So that’s it then? That’s the end of it?” Carmela asked. Kit nodded.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the end of that.”

 

 

*

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. As with all things, it wasn’t enough to just fix the immediate problem, especially given that the bigger picture involved the still likely death of a wizard just off Ordeal. It would take time to repair the civilization, which was a specialty that Kit didn’t have.

This was why he was left sitting outside the debriefing room in a neutral zone just outside Lesckan space while Carmela explained how she became involved in the situation and that she had some connections that might be able to help. She’d told her some of the names while Ronan was in there explaining his part in the whole intervention, but Kit wasn’t sure that she wasn’t pulling his leg. Surely his sister wasn’t speaking to the heir to the Yssrl Empire.

He glanced over at Ronan, who had settled into his chair and was checking his messages on his phone from the last week while it was recharging. Kit wondered when Apple had gone interstellar before deciding that perhaps he didn’t want to know when iPhones had gone off world. Some mysteries are best left that way.

Still, Ronan had been playing with his phone an awfully long time.

“How many are there?”

Ronan made a face. “A few hundred.”

Kit spluttered. “A few _hundred_? Do you know a few hundred people?”

“Well, yeah? Not all of them are to me in particular -- there’s a bunch of group messages but … what? How many do you get?”

Kit didn’t want to say the answer was somewhere around two to ten a week that weren’t from Nita. “Lots. Anyway, what’d they tell you?”

Still not looking up from his phone, Ronan shrugged. “That there’s going to be a team working with Zetae to make sure that things get back on track. Apparently as the first on site I should have done the things that Carmela had done: assess the wider political situation and work out who we need.”

“Really?”

Ronan shrugged again, trying to look like he wasn’t that affected by it. “No, they’re right. It’s something Irina told me before, after the Mars thing. We don’t think broad enough. Carmela runs rings around us there, you know?”

“Ouch.”

“Though I don’t think _anyone_ has Carmela’s connections. Have you seen her contacts list? It’s a checklist of all the influential people in the galaxy. And you, I guess.”

Kit gave him a Look. “For someone who asked me out a few hours ago, you could at least pretend you thought I was cool.”

“That would be a lie,” Carmela said, exiting the room and flopping down next to him. “You’ve never been cool.” She shuddered dramatically. “Is it always like that?”

“Is what? Debriefing? Yeah, when you have heavy hitters like that there,” Kit said. “I can’t believe that you’ve managed to avoid them.”

“I can,” Ronan said. “I know I would if I could. How’s Zetae?”

“She’s fine. I’m coming back here next week. But for now, we’re free to go.” Carmela then looked at both Kit and Ronan in turn. “Have you two kissed yet?”

“I’m glad you have your priorities in order,” Ronan muttered in annoyance. “We restarted an ancient wizardry, helped a wizard restart her Ordeal and didn’t get ourselves fried in the process and you want to know if we _kissed_?”

“I knew you’d succeed at those,” Carmela said.

“I’m glad someone did,” Kit retorted. “It was seriously touch and go for a while there.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Carmela said. “To be the fabulously coordinated and competent normal person who doesn’t get caught up in your hangups. Now, I have some free time, two wizards at loose ends and a Crossings that is just _begging_ for me to lay waste to its stores.”

"I'm out," Ronan said with a shrug. "I've got a week of apologies to make."

"So, Saturday?" Kit said.

"Yeah," Ronan said. "Later, Carmela. Keep him out of trouble."

She didn't. But that's a story for another time.


End file.
